How might speculative storytelling based in solidarity play a role in initiating change and generating futures based in justice and belonging?

Moving from the inequity embedded in aid to the reciprocity and mutuality of solidarity would require disentangling a web of deep-set and seemingly immutable policies and practices. Storytelling, as a potent discursive force in shaping our perception of the world, can play a vital role in destabilising these views and the power asymmetries that characterise these orientations. Whereas some stories and myths establish and entrench dominant perspectives — maintaining and validating the way things are — others imagine alternative possibilities that reach beyond the given. In moving beyond the stories of damage, resilience, and heroism that characterise humanitarian aid, how might speculative storytelling based in solidarity play a role in initiating change and generating futures based in justice and belonging?

Something like this?

Yeah! Very close to that!

From the top view, the toes would still be pretty indistinguishable because the fur would still obscure where one ends and another begins, but that's about right.

At this point in their evolution, you'd be able to tell right away from the tool claw that they're not Felis Catus Domesticus anymore. I had a specbio project I worked on for a while where I called them something like Felis Narrans I think.

i really like Jin's new jacket.

version without the lightning, can't decide which one i like more tbh:

There are some theories going around that the creators of Welcome Home are trying to make Julie and Frank a couple despite Frank being gay, which is why Frank and Eddie are forced to be distant in the show. I least that is what the audio has given me and some other people.

I’m answering this because I’ve gotten this vibe as well? I’m not quite sure what it is but from the audio clips it doesn’t seem like Eddie and Frank were so friendly with each other and you wouldn’t necessarily think they’d have ever gotten together in any situation.

Though I can’t tell if it’s Frank’s absolute sass or what, but the bug killing thing did sound like he was almost fond of how Eddie was reacting to such a silly little thing so I’m not sure! I wouldn’t put it past them (the shows creators) though. I mean, Welcome Home as a story doesn’t include events from the 70s of course so I wonder if the issues towards homosexuality would’ve been referenced at all in the project

I just know one of the members from the rival group is gonna be a cleric and convert to Cassandra. 😓 That's why Kipperlilly was asking. Their whole deal feels like they just want to be The Bad Kids but better.

I'm sorry, but from Eddie taking Buck on an unofficial date looking like he's ready to drop to his knees any second if the situation allowed, to meeting, supposedly, the love of his hetero life in a hardware store, a few episodes later, just doesn't compute for me.

I'm going to need to reset my brain. 🧠🤖

I feel like Forever will be the one to finally discover and intervene in regards to the soul vultures - and it’s not going to end well for him or BadBoyHalo when he does.

Q!Forever is so worried about Q!Bad, has expressed to multiple people that he knows how fragile he is. And I think many overlook that he told Bad that he remembered everything that happened while he was drugged. A passenger in his own body.

Meaning he knows what he said to Bad, that he likely remembers proposing - and he remembers the exact state Bad was in at the time. His language, his words, the tired stoop and how Bad was collapsing in on himself. Bad is coping just as badly as he is, on the opposite side of the pendulum’s swing.

He’s determined to give him a flower every day to cheer him up (no roses, yet), but he knows it’s not enough, he’s watching his friend fade away before his eyes and he’s scared. The affirmation room was a really wonderful gift, and I think it helped - emotionally. But it too is not enough on its own, a temporary harbour during stormy seas.

Action is what will truly bring change over words for these two - after all, actions are what have cause trust to waver, compared to words and prank wars and lies told with a straight face that both parties know are lies.

In addition, out of game, Forever (the CC) is essentially going to be offline for most of next month due to gatherings, conventions and traveling. so getting his character taken out of play for a bit in a manner that doesn’t directly involve the Federation this time seems likely - retreading the same ground is no fun. And Forever has also expressed excitement over Bad’s plans for Bad’s own character’s arc. They’re a pair of cheeky enablers, and they both love their complicated cat’s cradle tangle of a relationship that they’ve got going on - they wouldn’t indulge so fully if they didn’t. The CCs trust each other to tell a good story together, and I think that’s neat.

Which is why I think in trying to save Q!Bad from himself, Q!Forever is going to take a blow not intended for him. An action with a consequence neither foresee. Coupled with the morals balancing act Bad’s got going on with Baghera, I think the fallout of these respective efforts is going to be a shock to the BadBoyHalo core that finishes what his Skeppy-confided doubts started.

Or maybe it won’t. Bad is so unpredictable.

But so is Forever. And Forever considers Bad his family. That’s a powerful force - one Bad is going to underestimate, because I don’t think he’s had many people in his life willing to go that sort of distance for him.

I have a feeling that today’s streams are going to be interesting.

(Apparently first thing when I wake up and last thing before I sleep is when my brain goes off on meta tangents. Go figure!)

Today's unhinged thought... what if Buck accidently calls out Eddie's name in bed with Tommy? Like he doesn't even know he's done it, until Tommy decides to end things, gently telling him he might have some soul searching to do.

This causes Buck to realize he might be in love with his best friend, which freaks him out, because he doesn't want to make things weird for Eddie, cause Eddie is straight, so he starts to pull away a bit and distance himself.

This causes Eddie to feel confused and alone, like he has no one to turn to (tracks with Ryan's interview about season 8) which causes him to spiral even more!!!

thinking yet again about the ethical implications of aaravos creating sentient life he clearly has no concern over or towards in sir sparklepuff, but also the implications of it because: if aaravos can create life to that degree, can he push it further? can he make something scarier, meaner, more gruesome? will his armies just be products of his own magic, able to grow upon command and be replaced upon any sort of discard? 

I'm about 100 pages from the end of Fool's Fate and it's doing the same thing Patricia Brigg's Hurog trilogy did earlier this year, namely remind me of myself back in the early 2000s when these books were written. By which I mean (not derogatory!) they both remind me of (not derogatory!!) how I didn't think I was allowed to just write two guys happily having sex with each other so instead the story resorts to some of the most astonishing subliminal, symbolic, plausibly deniable, either textually or subtextually homophobic (not actually derogatory!!!) and frequently very angsty events! One might even call them intricate rituals!

there is no fictional narrative without the presence of God woven through it like a silver thread. in fact, They're far more interesting as a concept when they're allowed to govern the worlds of fiction, when They're channeled through a writer's hand, than when members of organised religions try to impose Their iron-fisted rule onto our chaotic and unpredictable reality.

i'm mostly an atheist, a luxury that fictional characters do not have at their disposal. especially not those from universes of fantasy, horror and the like, any narratives that interpolate myth and make use of magic (even magic that the characters call "science" – for all intents and purposes still magic). these narratives operate by rules ineffable to most fictional universe residents and no matter what they do, how they rage against their destinies, however positive and optimistic or dark and tragic those may be, they cannot break out.

New comic updates! Chapter 2 is still work in progress but I kinda wanna show how the story continues: https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/spellbound/list?title_no=896404&page=1

‘Night Stride’

Welcome Home Didia Hollander

Welcome Home Didia Hollander is my fourth novel ever, written in a frenzy in rage for the comprehensive befuckening of The Owl House's third season by Disney. Welcome Home Didia Hollander is about an orcish mom whose teenage daughter goes missing without a trace for two weeks, before showing up at her door with a half dozen other teens, all looking like they went through a warzone to get there. The story explores themes of healing from trauma, found family, death, disability, queerness, escaping state violence, seeking asylum as a youth, and being a mother to more than you ever thought you could or would.

This is definitely my best work so far, and I recommend you start here if you're interested in exploring Ienia as a setting, or my writing in general. I wrote this story in 24 days in a fury, and I think it best expresses my rage, sorrow, and love about being an Indigenous person in the diaspora, displaced from my home, and unable to return. It is a song for those of us dislocated, growing up unlanded, and seeking a home after ours is taken away. I hope you enjoy it

my GOD reddit is such a 'no fun allowed' place, yeesh

actually ascension needs its own post since that's the one with the most details to speculate over and im starved for soho talk so i will talk to myself if need be

First the cover again, because I kinda can't get over it:

my only thing is that I had been hoping we might get Lizbeth on a cover again since she's never been on one of the boxsets before, despite being the 2nd person credited on all 4 of them (even if that's just alphabetical, still, she's the only one of the four main characters who never makes the cover)

But letting that go...

I know we already kinda knew the brief for this one but damn I didn't expect it to go quite this hard. Maybe that's just because the Parasite & Ashenden covers were (comparatively) similarish to each other and I was so pleased with Unbegotten's, and then got so used to it as the placeholder for Ascension while they kept postponing it, I wasn't expecting anything this colorful or detailed or with what I can't help but register as Fun New Outfits even though these are still like, pretty damn basic as far as costumes go. Still, it's a different vibe from everyone in suits and trenchcoats on every cover, technically. (Oh the woes of being an audio fan such that two characters owning sweaters actually does qualify as new information)

On top of just being visually delightful though, I know we knew religion was gonna be a fairly big part of this one, but I didn't actually expect to get quite this much of it - though I'm glad of it for a number of reasons. The BF twitter already made the ineffable joke so I don't have to, but also yeah I did very much spend all of season 2 episode 4 of good omens half convinced Samuel Barnett & Dervla Kirwan were about to pop up around any given corner (if you will go around being gay supernatural and horrible at your messy bureaucratic jobs in midcentury soho then I'm sorry, this is where my brain's gonna go) - so, fuel to that fire. But in terms of actual important things, at least one of my Soho wishes looks to be being granted because we have a Rev Edward Folgate on the cast list, which must mean we're finally meeting Norton's father, even if his mother & brother don't appear (which they could, technically, I've definitely seen BF not list all the doublings on their cast tabs before). Religion, domesticity, and the nuclear family are all things that absolutely fascinate me when it comes to Norton's character, so getting any amount of story involving his father & his church is something I've been actively hoping for for a long time now.

(I will say I'm a tiny bit bummed Saffron Coomber isn't on the cast list to play Mia again, but I kinda figured she wasn't going to be since Greg Austin's Armitage, who's making his first recurring appearance after originating in Unbegotten, was listed ever since the boxset was announced - presumably if she was also returning, that would've been handled in the same way. But since Unbegotten ended with Lizbeth and Mia going on a date, I still held out hope. Who knows though, maybe things did go well for them and Lizbeth just has a better work/life balance than Norton so she can date someone without them getting dragged into every scifi plot. I know that's not a very common accomplishment for any Torchwood agent, but a gal can hope)

At this point I know I'm completely in the realm of speculation & even wishful thinking, but I'm really really hoping we get some more clues as to Norton's overall timeline in this one, and I have a feeling that even if there's nothing as direct as dates given, the events of a plot like this one are going to heavily influence my personal interpretation of it.

To say that life & death are major themes for the soho crew feels wildly reductive, but even by Torchwood's standards and taking into account its origins as a piece of media with Jack Harkness & his newfound immortality at the heart of it, the living/dead status of this bunch has always been fantastically up in the air to me. Obviously Ghost Mission introduced Norton as kind of a ghost before revealing more obvious ghostly characters later on to which the title might have been referring, but his being from the past did beg the question of his survival into Torchwood's present era all the same, which Outbreak later alludes to much more directly, and his habit of showing up via hologram in multiple stories only further obfuscates any certainty we might have about where & when he definitely can be said to be alive and well. Then you've got Lizbeth and Gideon both being effectively 'brought back to life' via paradoxes that prevented them ever having died in the first place. Again, they are very very far from being the only Torcwhood characters this happens to (for a sprawling EU, it's really rather impressive how often & in how many different ways Torchwood as a whole manages to circle back to being about like. chaotic undead queers at the end of every day. though I suppose that consistency is part of why I keep falling in love with its different iterations again and again). That's without even getting into the question of Norton's dubious fate in God Among Us - and I say dubious because I know some people take that to be his ultimate death, but I personally think that reading something as vague as that as having any kind of finality rather goes against the spirit of this whole world/series, not just because I want him to live. (There are obviously other ways to make him survive/reappear, but I don't see this as a River Song scenario where we can safely assume one of his earlier-released adventures had to happen at the end of his personal timeline). But wherever God Among Us falls for him, he does very much meet God in it - or at least, a god, since the sentinel in Unbegotten is also described as a god of sorts, and even if he doesn't ultimately have the status of the god Jacqueline King is playing there, Unbegotten is still full to bursting with ghosts/undead/came back wrong/echo characters to continue underscoring that life/afterlife theme.

So all things considered, even allowing for the fact that we know Norton's twin hobbies are lying about himself and abusing time travel to suit his own ends/ever-shifting alliances, I find it difficult to believe we could get through a whole 6-part boxset about religion & death without something providing some kind of compelling evidence about where this adventure fits in among his other run-ins with apocalypses and gods and ghosts and dead-but-still-here characters/creatures, so I'm very much looking forward to any further exploration on that front.

And lastly, and least intellectually, I really want to know what the hell 20th-century Torchwood's obsession with Reginalds is. Reading through the cast list, I had to do two separate doubletakes over the character 'Sir Reginald Peebles' - firstly, because I had Reginald Rigsby on the brain, this being Soho (and the other Troughton brother being so active on BF's releases for this same month) - and secondly, because reading this in conjunction with the announcement for the July monthly adventure in which the new main Torchwood guy of the 20s is apparently called Sir Reginald Dellafield, there was a brief moment where I took that monthly release to be a tie-in with Ascension. I don't expect it to be, but damn. was it really so popular a name?

anyways, catch me thinking about those stained glass windows for the next couple months I guess (and knowing Torchwood Soho, for a long long time after it comes out as well lol)